What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'
Life is fired at us point blank.
I am I plus my circumstances.
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme.
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man
Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.
[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.
Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.
I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.
The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
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